Paschal Mooney (Fianna Fail)

I am grateful to the Cathaoirleach and to the Leader for allowing me to make a brief acknowledgement of the enormous contribution made to politics in my native county by Pat Joe Reynolds and his family. I could not help but reflect that there were two Pat Joes. Speaking well of the dead is a great Irish trait, but we do not always speak well of people while they are alive. Senator Ross used the word "innocence" when talking about Pat Joe Reynolds, which did not strike me as a word I would have used in the context of my knowledge of him. I assure the House that he certainly was not innocent. He was one of the old ward bosses in the best traditions of the term. He ran the Fine Gael organisation in Leitrim with a ruthlessness that we all envied and admired. As Senator Dardis said, the contribution he made and which his family continues to make to public life in Leitrim and nationally is immense.

In doing research some years ago for the book, Women in Parliament, Ireland: 1918-2000, I discovered some details about Mary Reynolds. The Leader rightly made a glowing reference to Mrs. Reynolds, widow of the late Paddy Reynolds, for her service of 29 years in the Dáil. She holds the record for the longest serving woman in Parliament since the foundation of the State. In our research we found that she did not make a great many speeches, but she was very effective in doing a great deal of work in the Sligo-Leitrim constituency as it was then.

The Reynolds family and mine were very greatly intertwined and I will surprise some people by telling them that the intertwining was not just personal but political. My grandfather, whom I did not know, had been a member of Cumann na nGaedheal and fought numerous elections, both selection conventions as well as general elections, with the Reynolds family, who lived only some 12 miles away. I have grown up with this very strong tradition of the impact of the Reynolds family on politics in Leitrim, which is continued by Gerry, currently a member of Leitrim County Council.

Pat Joe had some wonderful qualities and was the quintessential politician at local and national levels. While I was not a Senator when he served as Cathaoirleach, it is obvious he had mellowed considerably in political terms by the time he arrived here. This view is widely shared by many people in County Leitrim, of all parties and none. The contribution the Reynolds family has made since the foundation of the State and continues to make is immense and admired by everybody.

Senator Ross is correct in that Pat Joe Reynolds was unbending in his political views, one of which was the strong constitutional position he adopted at a time when the troubles in Northern Ireland were spilling across the Border into Leitrim. It is interesting that there is a public monument in Ballinamore to the late John Joe McGirl, a politician who also made an immense contribution in his own way but who did not take the constitutional path, yet there is no monument to Pat Joe Reynolds who stuck rigidly to the constitutional path. The legacy he, his father, mother and grandfather left is one we enjoy today. Sometimes we forget that they lived in difficult times.

I convey my sympathy to Tess, Gerry, Peter, Ita and Regina, all of whom are good friends of mine. The Reynolds family has always been and will remain good friends of the Mooney family, irrespective of politics. That was what was great about Pat Joe Reynolds and his family. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam.